By Sydney Panagos, Co-founder of TIPS Chip
Does Tallow Actually Hold Up When You Fry In It?
The question I hear most about our chips is some version of: sure, tallow tastes great — but can it really handle a deep fryer, batch after batch? Last year a team of food chemists put that exact question to the test, and they didn’t make it easy on the tallow.
What did the 2025 Food Chemistry frying study find?
Lei and colleagues, publishing in Food Chemistry in 2025, ran beef tallow and its liquid fraction against high-oleic rapeseed oil and rice bran oil as deep-frying fats. The researchers reported that whole tallow showed superior physicochemical properties during frying, with lower deterioration than the plant oils, and that benzo[a]pyrene increased in the plant oils during frying but remained low in tallow and its liquid fraction.
Benzo[a]pyrene is one of the compounds food scientists track when heated oils start to break down — so “stayed low under real frying conditions” is exactly the result you want to see from a fat you cook with. We’ve written before about what happens to seed oils at frying temperature; this study asks the same question from tallow’s side.
What does this look like in my kitchen?
I actually grew up cooking with a lot of the same oils that are everywhere today, so I didn’t think much about it. When I started experimenting with tallow, the biggest thing I noticed was how stable it felt — it didn’t smoke as quickly, it didn’t leave my kitchen smelling like burnt oil, and it seemed to handle high heat much better. When we started making chips, the difference became even more obvious: the chips weren’t coated in excess oil, and the tallow itself held up really well from batch to batch. It was one of those things where I saw it once and couldn’t unsee it.
The more I cooked with tallow, the more it reminded me of how my grandparents cooked — simple ingredients, traditional fats, in a food that just tasted better. That’s ultimately what led us to build TIPS around beef tallow in the first place.
Why do we cook TIPS chips in 100% beef tallow?
Every batch of TIPS kettle-style chips is fried in 100% beef tallow — the same fat this study put through real frying conditions. We chose it for taste first, and because a kettle process is only as good as the fat in the kettle. Findings like Lei’s are why we’re comfortable saying the old-school choice wasn’t a compromise. Our seed-oil-free approach starts with what goes in the fryer, not with what the front of the bag says.
What’s the honest fine print on this study?
Two things, because we’d rather you read the study than take our word for it. First, the comparison oils were high-oleic rapeseed and rice bran — two of the more heat-stable plant oils — not the high-linoleic seed oils most snacks are fried in. So this study doesn’t claim tallow beats every oil; it held its own against the strong ones. Second, the researchers found the isolated liquid fraction of tallow had a much shorter oxidative induction time in bench testing — 0.38 hours versus 5.85 and 5.24 hours for the plant oils — even though whole tallow outperformed during actual frying. Whole tallow is what matters in a fryer, and it’s what we use.
Source: Lei F, et al. Food Chemistry, 2025;476:143515. PubMed 40015054